Nothing is more important to a child's success in school than having qualified and prepared teachers. However, many children do not have the benefit of a well-prepared or highly qualified teacher in the classroom.
Instructional materials are an essential component to a well-taught course. A well-planned lesson is much more likely to enhance a curriculum, enrich students, ensure adequate coverage, and make a teacher's professional life a bit easier. Unfortunately, many teachers do not have the time, resources or skills to prepare high quality instructional materials.
A instructional material should be detailed and complete enough so that another teacher knowledgeable in the subject matter could deliver lessons without needing to contact the drafter frequently. However, many instructional materials are sketchy and incomplete. Thus, a successor is often relegated to struggling with a predecessor's inadequate plan or scrapping it and starting from scratch.
Consistent, complete and comprehensive instructional materials are perhaps the most essential tool when striving to provide highly qualified instruction. Additionally, a better prepared teacher leads to improved student achievement. Because all students are entitled to a good education and are expected to pass similar standardized exams, it is imperative that instructors of a subject cover the same and depth of required topics based on state and national standards. Unfortunately, however, many teachers are not prepared or qualified to cover substantially the breadth and depth of required topics.
Not only do instructors lack access to complete subject-specific instructor-oriented course materials, they also lack access to subject-specific mentors. Ideally, a subject-specific mentoring program would provide convenient access to experts who are intimately familiar with the instructional material, and have the education and experience needed to resolve ambiguities and fill in gaps. Likewise, an instructor-oriented course would preferably be available on-demand and relate directly to the instructional material. However, as no such series of subject-specific distance learning graduate level courses or subject-specific mentoring programs exist, instructors are often relegated to learning how to teach a subject on their own and resolving issues on their own, often through trial and error or by ad hoc communication with unknown third parties over the Internet.
To address perceived shortcomings with the public education system, on Jan. 8, 2002, President George Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, which endeavors to raise academic and teaching standards. One aspect of the NCLB is instructor qualification. Each state education agency must have developed a plan to ensure that all teachers are “highly qualified” by the end of the 2005-06 school year (or by 2007 in rural areas). The plan must establish annual, measurable objectives for each local school district and school to ensure that they meet the “highly qualified” requirement. However, the credentials needed to meet the “highly qualified” requirement are unattainable to instructors in certain circumstances. In general, under the NCLB, K12 teachers must prove that they know the subject they teach with: 1) a major in the subject they teach, 2) credits equivalent to a major in the subject, 3) passage of a state-developed test, 4) according to a High, Objective, Uniform State Standard of Evaluation (HOUSSE), 5) an advanced certification from the state, or 6) a graduate degree. The invention is directed to overcoming the shortcomings of teachers in one or more of the qualifiers as set forth above.